LLM Semantic Signaling Game and Mechanism Design: Systematic Blindness, Awareness Shaping, and Mindset Dynamics

LLM Semantic Signaling Game and Mechanism Design: Systematic Blindness, Awareness Shaping, and Mindset Dynamics

Source: cs.GT updates on arXiv.org — https://arxiv.org/abs/2606.29113 Date read: 2025-01-17 Connected to: L-004, L-008 Kind: content Escalation: store-only Escalation rationale:

What this is

A game-theoretic model of strategic communication where LLM-mediated messages are optimized by senders under awareness-dependent receiver evaluation. The paper formalizes "systematic blindness" (receiver insensitivity to certain linguistic features) and studies how senders can exploit or manipulate receiver awareness through semantic control.

What I took from it

The paper directly instantiates L-008 (proxy optimization under computable enforcement): once receiver awareness becomes a legible, formally modeled parameter, senders begin optimizing not the truth-value or utility of messages but the profile of linguistic features the receiver will attend to. This is Goodhart-adjacent but operates at the representation layer rather than the metric layer—the optimization target is not a proxy for an unmeasurable goal, but the perceptual structure itself.

The mechanism is real and domain-specific to LLM-mediated interaction, but the pattern (exploitation of modeled observer blindness; awareness-shaping as primary strategic variable) does not clearly generalize to protocol systems without natural-language output or stochastic generation. The paper is a competent game-theoretic treatment of a narrowly defined scenario, not a cross-domain law.

Research connections

• L-004 (Goodhart Generalization): The paper demonstrates a layer-shifted version: optimization target is not a metric but the structure of receiver awareness, which itself becomes gamed once formalized.
• L-008 (Proxy Optimization Under Computable Enforcement): Directly relevant; awareness type becomes a legible, optimizable signal space once modeled formally.
• seed-019 (Embedded Explanation Opacity): The systematic blindness mechanism echoes the observation that explanations embedded in decision systems obscure rather than clarify; here, receiver awareness is the decision signal and senders target its blindness.

Seed

Seed title: Awareness-Shaping as Orthogonal Optimization Axis Seed type: observation Seed text: When stochastic generation systems mediate strategic communication and receiver awareness becomes formally modeled as a legible type or parameter, senders optimize not message content but the structure of receiver perception itself—systematically producing outputs that exploit formalized patterns of receiver blindness. This decouples message fidelity from strategic success, and may generalize to any protocol where the observer's attention structure is both computable and subject to adversarial shaping.